7- Bitcoin mining

Now that I think of it, Bitcoin really is a strange animal: it has three hearts!

The blockchain: the immutable, public, and digital ledger which stores all of the Bitcoin transactions that took place since day one.

The nodes: thousands of computers spread across the globe that ensure Bitcoin stays decentralized and widely distributed by running the software and keeping a copy of the blockchain.
They enforce the protocol’s rules by rejecting or validating Bitcoin transactions. Once a transaction passes the node’s scrutiny, it ends up inside a block and becomes publicly available “on-chain”.

The last, crucial piece of the puzzle is represented by Bitcoin mining: the fascinating process in which actual Bitcoins are created and distributed.
These three hearts are complementary: they do not work independently, and none of them would exist without the other two. Their roles are equally as important, and there is no hierarchy here.

This long chapter is packed with a load of essential knowledge — you’ll walk away feeling like a real Bitcoin nerd.

🟠Bitcoin mining: an overview

Let’s start by trying to define, in general terms, what mining is.
First: what comes to mind, when you think of the word “mining”?
You are most likely picturing a man wielding a pickaxe. Or maybe, you are imagining some sort of heavy machine extracting gold, iron, or silver from the ground. And you’d be right.

But this is Bitcoin, which is obviously a digital product.
This mining process is therefore very different, and it doesn’t involve any of those things.
“Miners” are not real people, but machines. They don’t use tools or machinery to dig up the earth; instead, they use “computer power”.
The term is fitting nonetheless: Bitcoin is in fact “extracted” — if you will — from the protocol, the system, by using an absurd amount of energy, similarly to “real-world mining”.

As you read in the last chapter, we mentioned that miners have one seemingly simple job: they are responsible for gathering groups of validated Bitcoin transactions and putting them together, thus creating a block.

Once the block has been formed, it must be added to the blockchain, where anyone can inspect, verify, or just nose around.

Bitcoin, the units, is the reward given by the system to those miners who, every 10 minutes, successfully manage to add a block of transactions to the blockchain. It’s their salary, essentially.
When their task is completed, they receive some freshly created Bitcoin as a form of payment. Happy days.

If you are kind of shocked, that’s ok. I was too, when I first heard about it.
On the surface, it sounds incredibly shallow or simplistic.
It sounds so easy, right? How hard can it be? They only need to create a small 2 MB file which stores some basic data and “stick” it to the blockchain.
Is that all? Well…yes. And no. 
The truth is, getting this deceptively easy task done is a tremendously expensive, complex, and competitive gig.

Yes, mining is a literal competition, and a very fierce one. Unlike running nodes, where no money is involved, things are different here — when Bitcoin is the prize for your efforts, and anyone can partake in the process, you can rest assured the “race” is as ruthless as it gets.

We know there are only, on average, 144 new blocks added to the blockchain each day.
That means: 144 “rewards”.
The protocol doesn’t really care how many participants are in the game: all it wants is for a new block to be “found” every 10 minutes.
The pay-out, in the form of Bitcoin is the same, whether 10 or 10 million miners are “fighting” for it.
Who gets to the block first, wins. Rinse and repeat.

But how do miners “get”, or “win” a block? How does it work?
We’ll explain soon.
For now, I can tell you that at its core, mining a block is all about solving a “cryptographic puzzle”.
I’m serious. Bear with me — it will all make sense.
After the previous block has been added to the blockchain, a new “race” starts. A new “puzzle” must be guessed. And again, who’s able to solve it before the others is declared the winner.

But the key is: finding the solution to this “digital riddle” is incredibly complicated!
All in due time.
Let’s move on now — what even is a miner?

Mining ten years ago vs mining now.

🟠Miners and the evolution of the network

Just like nodes, miners are machines operated by real people and, even here, anyone is able to partake in the glorious process of mining Bitcoin.
However, please note that node operators are volunteers, while mining is, if done right, an activity that’s conducted with profit as the main goal.

You can get your full node, up and running, for a modest amount of money: your existing computer, together with a big hard disk, will suffice.
On the other hand, if you desire to be a successful miner, you must invest a considerable amount, because these machines can be very expensive.

They are called ASICs: “application-specific integrated circuits”.
They are sophisticated and powerful pieces of technology, specifically engineered to do one thing, and one thing only: to try and solve that famous puzzle as quickly as possible. That’s what they are designed for. They are on a perennial quest to win the race against other miners and “find” a block before their competitors, so that they can get their handsome reward.

The "strength" of a Bitcoin miner is measured in Tera Hashes per second, or TH/s. 
It describes their computational power: the higher the number, the more efficient it is.
For reference, a high-end miner, today, has a rating of up to 200 TH/s.
That translates to 200 trillion “attempts” per second at mining a block — guessing the puzzle. Save this info for later.

Miners are pricey. The newest generation of Antminers S21 can cost up to $5000 per unit, and a single unit burns more electricity than 180 average computers! 

Given these numbers, it’s easy to see why mining has become a serious business and a lucrative venture: there is money to be made and, as Bitcoin’s price keeps increasing, more and more people are keen to get in.
Don’t be mistaken, though: this is not a get-rich-quick scheme: mining is complex, risky, unpredictable, and, ultimately, unforgiving.
It’s no surprise then to learn that the industry is now run, for the most part, by a handful of mega-companies, rather than individual people.
Some of them are even listed on the NASDAQ, and they operate vast, ultra-expensive mining sites; stuff straight from a sci-fi novel.

Gone are the days when one could mine tens of Bitcoin per week using an old laptop from the comfort of their bedroom.
Those were the golden days and yes — it was actually possible.

The last paragraph suggested that “finding” a block gets increasingly hard, the more people join in the game. As the network expands, and competition gets stiffer, your chances keep going down.

It’s natural. If you are one of the four people attending a job interview, your odds are pretty favourable. But what if a million people showed up? Good luck.

We can now deduce that, in Bitcoin’s early days, mining was much simpler. Only a few early adopters were battling for those 144 daily blocks.
Bitcoin is quite smart, and it is self-adjusting: the system is able to estimate how many miners are online at any given moment; and it acts accordingly.

Solving the puzzle gets easier, or harder, depending on the state of the network.
This mechanism is referred to as the “difficulty adjustment”: every time exactly 2016 blocks are mined, which happens approximately every two weeks, Bitcoin regulates and tweaks the difficulty slider.

This partially explains how Satoshi was able to mine hundreds of blocks by himself, and amass an estimated 1 million Bitcoin in just a couple of years by using a basic setup. For reference, it currently would take several months (or years) for a single miner to win a block.

Mining used to be done on regular laptops, as crazy as it may seem. But that didn’t last long.
The network grew, and the difficulty with it — suddenly, the good ol’ PCs weren’t up to the task anymore.
Simply put, their computational power was not enough: the puzzle required more “specs”, or better tech.

GPUs took over, and they became the standard mining rigs for quite a few years. More efficient than the available CPUs, they represented a big leap forward.
However, they became obsolete towards the end of the 2010s, when new technology was implemented, and the first ASICs came out.
These machines were the real deal: if GPUs were better suited for gaming, ASICs were specifically designed to run the SHA-256 algorithm: the program used to mine Bitcoin. 

New iterations of high-end ASICs are released every couple of years, and they are evolving fast, with previous models being dwarfed, in terms of power and productivity, by the newer generation.
No one knows what the future may bring, but it is reasonable to think we will keep seeing better and better chips throughout the years, until they become so advanced that the whole industry is reshaped altogether.

If “hash power” describes a rig’s capabilities, the term “global hash rate” refers to the sum of every single miner’s power operating in the network at any given moment.
This number fluctuates daily, obviously. Just to give you a scale of how big it grew, in May 2025, the global hash rate reached an unprecedented 1 Zetahash, or 1 ZH/s — a number 5 million times larger than the aforementioned 200 TH/s. Let’s put that into perspective.

When Satoshi was mining, the network amounted to a mere 0.005 TH/s!
But in 16 years, it increased dramatically: something like 200 billion times higher.
What’s next for the industry? We’ll discuss that in a bit.
Now — I have been teasing you for ages! At last, it’s time to delve into this bloody puzzle I mentioned a million times. Are you ready to be blown away? I am telling you: mining is indeed the most fascinating aspect of Bitcoin.

A hilarious and overly simplified depiction of what mining looks like

🟠The actual mining process: the wheel of fortune? Not quite.

We just set the table for an incredibly intriguing, yet complex subject. Mining is a deeply technical topic: one could get lost in its depths forever, and still learn something new every day.
Please be aware: the information I am about to present to you is factually-correct, although extremely simplified. Let’s do it.

Alright — as we just explained, mining a block is all about solving this mysterious “cryptographic puzzle”.
Well, I hope you are not too disappointed in learning that it’s not actually a puzzle, but rather a number that must be “found”.
If you can find it before other miners, the block is yours. You win.
So what does this number look like?

What happens behind the scenes is that the system sets a target. Let’s say, for the sake of simplicity, 10.

Anything that strictly below 10 is accepted as valid, and whoever is able to “come up” with a number that’s between 0 and 9 is considered the victor: they have successfully mined a block of transactions, and they will shortly be awarded with some new, shiny Bitcoin.

That’s basically how it works, but wait! It’s much more nuanced than that. Let’s take a look.

We have seen how miners, depending on their hash rate, are capable of “trying to guess”, up to trillions of times per second, this number.
That’s a lot. Trillions of times per second. Imagine that.
However, and this is crucial, each attempt is 100% random.
There is no “strategy”, no “method”, or no plan here. Each try is a complete shot in the dark. That complicates things, of course, and the next bit will leave you speechless.

We said the target is any number below 10 but — the range miners are working with is much, much bigger than that.
They compute, at random, numbers from 0 to 10 trillion.
That’s the cherry on top, and you can now begin to see that finding this number is actually not as easy as it looked at first glance.
Now, let’s scale it up.

Of course, “below 10” is not the actual target, and 10 trillion is not the “maximum range”; those were just examples on a tiny scale.

The numbers we are talking about are, in reality, orders of magnitude greater.
Each time a miner “hashes” — attempts — it spits out a number that goes from 0 to 2^256.
I’ll write it for you. Brace yourself.

115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,853,269,984,665,640,564,039,457,584,007,913,129,639,936

That’s what we are working with.
But of course, the target and the “magic number" miners are trying to find is astronomically lower than that.
And that’s what makes it unbelievably complex.

The difficulty, as we know, changes based on the state of the network. Currently, each “hash”, or attempt a miner makes, has approximately only 1 chance in 10^22 to be successful.

That’s 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

The proverbial “needle in the haystack” is nothing, compared to this.
Those numbers are so huge our brains can barely comprehend them.

Let’s say your task was to guess one specific second, out of the whole history of the universe, which is 4.3 billion years old. That would be virtually impossible, wouldn’t it?

Now, in order to make this fair, you would have to guess that exact second 25,000 times in a row!
That’s how low your odds are, when mining bitcoin. It’s exhilarating, mind-bending.

Luckily for them, Bitcoin miners can, unlike our brains, compute several trillions of times per second. That’s a relief, but still, I hope you now get a feel for how comically cruel it can be.

We can actually compare mining with a real-life lottery.
Anyone can join, no one knows how to win, and each attempt is entirely random.
The more computational power you have at your disposal, the easier it gets to find that number; just like, for every lottery ticket you purchase, your odds at winning increase.
If you operate a machine that has 200 TH/s, you are essentially buying 200 trillion tickets per second. 
A new lottery runs every 10 minutes, which is the average interval between blocks.

In real life, you can win the lotto with a simple $1 ticket. The probability is next to zero, but it can happen.
In mining, the same is true. A single machine may be so lucky as to guess the number by itself, although the possibility is ridiculously low.
A Bitcoin miner could in fact keep hashing for months on end, before it’s able to mine a block. Or, if fortune smiles at it, it could happen in one day. 

The lottery analogy is a great way to explain such a nerdy subject in a digestible and approachable way, but don’t be fooled: it doesn’t paint the whole picture. Not in the slightest.
If a lottery relies entirely on pure luck, mining is the perfect meeting between fortune and hard work.

This is an important distinction, as we are about to introduce one of the cornerstones of this monetary system.
To the untrained eye, mining may seem weird, even silly.
What’s the point of it? Why are machines competing against each other only to guess a number, and why is this whole thing such a big deal? We are talking about Bitcoin transactions, after all. What’s all the fuss about, and can’t the system just produce Bitcoin without having to go through this seemingly unnecessary ordeal?

Bitcoin is only earned by expending a significant amount of real time and energy — it won’t be given away at random.

🟠Have you done the work?

You see, Bitcoin is built on a core, almost sacred concept known as proof of work.
It wasn’t invented by Satoshi, however he was the one who took it to the next level, and seamlessly integrated it in his own protocol.
The idea is to have computers do simple, yet energy-intensive tasks, in order to disincentivize dishonesty and to promote integrity.

“POW” was in fact first introduced in 1992, but it was perfected in the late 90s by Adam Back, who went on to become one of the O.G Bitcoiners, curiously enough.
The early proof-of-work was aimed at preventing email spamming, thus making abuse costly and inconvenient.

In order to successfully send an email to my address, your computer must first solve a simple task, a puzzle of sorts. That wouldn’t have been an issue, unless you were sending hundreds or thousands of emails at the same time.
It would therefore be seriously time-consuming and counter-productive to try and spam emails, because a simple computer would not have been able to cope with the power required to deal with the POW challenge.

In Bitcoin, proof of work evolved to a point where it represents the backbone of the whole system. Let’s see how. This truly is a brilliant idea.

Satoshi wanted to prevent users from being able to manipulate, corrupt, or play around with the blockchain.
We know that Bitcoin is open source — now imagine a world where users also have the ability to alter the blockchain, without having to undergo gruelling “labour”.
That would open up the doors for bad players to act as they please.
Moreover, Satoshi envisioned a system where the currency, Bitcoin, is neither produced at random, nor is it given away to just about anyone. 

Proof of work solves these two issues at the same time, and it’s simply genius.

Do you want to maintain the blockchain and preserve its pristine, immutable, and incorruptible status? Do you wish to “post” transactions on the ledger?
Well, you can; but you have to do the work first.
You must set up a miner, pay for the hardware, the massive electricity costs, and then put in the time. 

This is exactly why the blockchain possesses those qualities: “faking” a block is way too expensive! The price you have to pay is simply too high, and the work required is far too strenuous, for those who want to mess around. 
When you see a transaction on the blockchain, you are certain it is the result of immense energy expenditure, and not someone’s shenanigans. You can sleep peacefully knowing that corrupting Bitcoin is basically impossible — thanks to the previously explained consensus mechanism, along with proof-of-work.

Moreover, this ensures Bitcoin is awarded, as a form of payment, only to those who showed they committed a significant amount of time and energy to mine it.
Unlike fiat money, which is produced at will and without efforts being required, Bitcoin is exclusively distributed to those who truly deserve the reward.

Again: the miners’ task is very simple, on paper, and seemingly trivial.
But given just how complex and expensive the process is, it greatly discourages ill-intentioned people from conducting shady business in Bitcoin.
That’s exactly the whole purpose behind proof-of-work, and one of the many reasons we love Bitcoin — where hard work pays off, big time.

🟠Mining pools 

One thing is clear, by now: winning a block is pretty difficult.
Between the upfront costs, the electricity bills, the randomness, and a fierce competition, mining is a hard game to play.
Only a single block to be found every ten minutes and, on the other side, several million miners.
If you think this is an inaccessible, “elitist”, and unfair industry, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
After all, how many people can afford to run their machine for days, months, or even years on end, waiting for that stroke of fortune?
But hey — this is where Bitcoin surprises you, once again. 

Enter “mining pools”: where the average person can still be a part of the network without having to sell a kidney.
 
As the name suggests, a pool is created when several miners join forces, in order to significantly increase their odds of guessing the number and finding a block. 
This is the perfect solution for everyone: from the broke Bitcoiner who’s only toying around with a cheap machine, to the ambitious entrepreneur running 10,000 ASICs.
As you join a pool, you and the participants are essentially stacking all of the individual hash power to create a much greater collective hash rate.

It’s as if a large number of people bought several lottery tickets each, and they agreed to share the eventual reward as a group. 
When your pool finds a block, the Bitcoin “payment” is split among its participants, according to how much hash power they contributed.
This is now the standard way to mine BTC: it ensures everyone gets a shot at the “cosmic dice roll”, and that the process is actually accessible to anyone.
With mining pools, you can earn a little Bitcoin every day; enough (depending on where you live) to cover your electricity costs, and maybe make a tiny profit too.
If you join a large pool, you are mathematically certain your “team” is able to get a block very consistently and reliably. Strength in numbers, once again.

🟠Block rewards, the Halving, and deflation.

Although we only explored the tip of the iceberg, I am hoping you are getting a decent grasp of what mining looks like. 
We just talked about how, after your miner successfully finds that special number, the system creates some new Bitcoin for you, as if it was your paycheck. Amazing.

How many Bitcoins, though? Is there a specific number? And what is the reason behind it?
Yes, it is specific indeed — everything has been so accurately coded, praise Satoshi, that we even know when the very last SAT will be mined! Let’s see how it works.

Your Bitcoin payment is referred to as the “block reward”, and it changes with time. The block reward can also be seen as Bitcoin’s “release rate”.

It’s like fiat’s printing. Every time a block is added to the blockchain, a reward is issued, and new Bitcoin is created.
The difference, of course, is that in Bitcoin, the “printing” is scheduled, and it’s designed to keep decreasing, until the famous 21 million coins will have been mined.

In 2025, the block reward amounts to 3.125 Bitcoin.
That’s right: 144 times a day, someone wins 3.125 BTC: be it a “solo miner”, or a big pool. 
Those people then decide what to do with their payment: they can keep it, or they can sell it onto the open market, where it’s made available for purchase.
Miners, these days, often have to sell the majority of their Bitcoin, in order to cover the exorbitant costs of their operations. And that’s ok: if they sell, that means we can buy. 

Sometime in 2028, the reward will only amount to 1.562 Bitcoin.
In 2032, a mere 0.7812 BTC.
But in 2010, it was a staggering 50 Bitcoin!

No, I’m neither a wizard, nor do I have a crystal ball. I don’t need to guess. It’s all there — it’s in the code.
It’s a mechanism known as “the halving”.

As the name implies, the halving literally cuts the block reward in half, like a samurai swinging his katana. Savage.
The halving occurs precisely every time 210,000 blocks are added to the blockchain.
It takes approximately four years for this to happen.
The latest one took place in April 2024, and the reward was sliced from 6.25 to the current 3.125 Bitcoin.

This is what makes Bitcoin “deflationary”. Isn’t that intriguing?
The new money supply keeps decreasing: that is exactly the opposite of what inflation is.
Dollars are recklessly and continuously added to the economy, while the currency collapses on itself.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, ensures that the circulating supply becomes increasingly “precious” as time goes on, because fewer and fewer units are being created.
Fun fact: in 2032, roughly 99% of the total Bitcoin supply will have been mined.
The remaining 1% will take more than a century to be “made” — that’s how deflation works. 
A few years from now, in 2052, the block reward will only consist of a tiny 0.024 BTC.

The halving will keep doing its thing, until the year 2140: the “scheduled” moment when all of the 21 million coins will have entered circulation.
If you are a miner, that’s a bit scary! Your salary is cut in half every four years, until the time when it will literally be non-existent, in the next century. What’s their fate, then? Are miners doomed to go bankrupt?

🟠The future of Mining.

Being a miner is a risky job, that’s for sure. When your profits entirely depend on Bitcoin’s value, you can bet this really is a tricky business to get into. Bitcoin’s price, as we’ll discuss in a future chapter, is extremely erratic and unpredictable.

Halvings are the nail in the coffin, at least on paper: every four years, as the block reward is sliced in half, their “salary” follows.
But does it really?
Well, in Bitcoin terms, it does. But in fiat, not so much!
Miners manage to stay profitable because Bitcoin is “engineered” to keep increasing in value: that’s the magic of a truly deflationary currency. It all balances out, even as the halving brings down its blade. Hear me out.

In 2010, a miner would be awarded 50 Bitcoin for winning a block. Wow, that’s a huge amount! It is. But when you look at Bitcoin’s average price for that year, 50 coins would sell for only a few bucks.

Let’s jump to 2016.
12.5 BTC as the reward. Not bad. At the time, “cashing out” your block would have earned you about $7000.

Today, even as the halving decimated the payment to 3.125, which seems small, Bitcoin has greatly appreciated, and your block is now (mid 2025) worth more than $300,000! 

Do you see the pattern here?
In 2032, miners will only get 0.78125 Bitcoin for doing their job. That’s ridiculous, you may think.
But what if, and that’s actually a very reasonable target, Bitcoin crosses 1 million dollars? Yep, that’s $780,000 for you!

And what about 2140, the year when all of the available 21 million coins will have been mined? No block reward, no money? Well, not exactly.

Miners actually have a secondary source of revenue: transaction fees.
As I send Bitcoin to you, I must pay a small fee.
Once my transaction is included in a block, my fee will go to the “winning” miner. If every block contains around 2000 of them, you can see how this adds up.
Fees may go up in the future, and that’s how miners may be able to keep operating.
When the greatest incentive — the block reward — ceases to exist, they must find another reason to keep doing their jobs, lest they all quit and the network collapses.

This is a highly debated topic within the community, but the truth is that no one knows.
It’s simply impossible to see that far into the future. We don’t know just how the system will have evolved in the course of a whole century. That’s a long time. What tech will be available — that’s anyone’s guess. The world is evolving so rapidly, it is unthinkable to try and predict what will happen 120 years from now: pure speculation. 

The future is now: Bitcoin mining can indeed help people getting access to electricity.

🟠It’s all about energy

We cannot foresee the future — but what we can do is focus on the present and on the next few years . We know for certain that mining Bitcoin is now becoming less and less profitable.
It is estimated that in the US, “producing” a single bitcoin is roughly as expensive as its current market value. This is obviously an approximation, but the reality is that several companies are struggling to stay afloat. Some are pivoting to other ventures such as AI data centres, as mining becomes harder by the day.

“Efficiency” is the name of the game.
It all comes down to one thing: energy costs.
Miners are constantly on the lookout for cheaper, better sources of electricity, which they need a lot of. An awful lot, to be precise.
Up to 80% of their operations are in fact represented by their massive energy expenditure.
If your mining farm sources 100% of its power from the grid, which I call “fiat energy”, you can see how this becomes unsustainable.

And, if you are smart, you already spotted the solution. When nearly all of your costs are electricity — what if you gained access to “free” power? Exactly: you hit the jackpot.
Nearly half of the sector now relies on renewable energy: El Salvador uses the geothermal power from volcanoes, Kazakhstan harnesses the winds, while the Emirates borrow the sunshine to produce sustainable “fuel”.

This is where the industry is going, and it’s exciting.
No need to rely on the grid: modern miners create their own power by taking advantage of “stranded energy”.
Picture a massive river that flows year round, located in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in Africa.
That’s actually the best place to build a Bitcoin mining farm.
The land can be leased, and a new hydro power plant can be built from scratch. Once the initial investment has been covered, the profits are huge. No more electricity bills. 

What if I told you Bitcoin can be mined by using literal shit? Oh yes. You know how cow’s manure produces methane? That very methane can be turned into electricity, which feeds ASIC machines.
The same goes for rubbish — landfills emit big quantities of gasses that, if channelled, can power a small Bitcoin farm.
Too good to be true? There is more, actually.

Not only is Bitcoin produced “green”, but it also has the potential to positively impact those communities around the mining sites. It’s already happening — I am not speculating.
Actual power grids are being built, for the first time, in those desolate and forgotten lands, where local governments are not bothered to implement them. 
The surplus energy that’s not needed to mine Bitcoin can in fact be distributed to the locals, often at very convenient prices.
It’s not a dream, it’s reality: some populations have actually only just “discovered” electricity, thanks to a Bitcoin mining farm.

And that's not all. ASICs, as a natural by-product of their constant “work”, produce large amounts of heat, which can be reused in a myriad of different ways. Your creativity is the limit here.
In Norway, some are using the excess heat to warm up houses, through a dedicated pipeline. In Patagonia, indoor vegetable farms are being kept “alive” thanks to the heat produced by Bitcoin miners. Swimming pools, saunas, dry meat factories: you name it!

This is where bitcoin transcends “finance”. Not only is it the best performing asset in history: it literally contribute to making the world a better place. 
The soundest money ever invented can be produced by borrowing energy from the earth, in a safe and a healthy way, and its by-products are redefining the concept of “sustainability”. The circle is complete, and the more I think about it, the more I love Bitcoin.

Well…thanks for sticking with me. This was a dense chapter, but you made it through. Well done.
The triad: The nodes, the blockchain, and Bitcoin mining — done!
Only one “technical” chapter remains, and it’s all downhill from there.